Emotions Are The Worst...
Dearly Beloved,
Emotions are the worst....
Do you ever feel that way? Being 7 weeks into our book and sermon series on Emotional Health it can begin to feel like a bottomless pit of emotions. It takes a great deal of vulnerability, and courage to face our inner turmoil...which is exhausting. It's an actual expenditure of energy, all that hard work. (If only it counted as an expenditure of calories too, hey?!)
I was chatting with my coffee club this week about growing into emotionally mature adults. Someone made the comment, “I mean, it just feels so overwhelming to go from emotional infant (in some areas) to adult. Where do we even begin?”
In the movie “What About Bob?”, Dr. Leo Marvin writes a book called “Baby Steps” and it becomes Bob’s life mantra. Baby steps out the door, baby steps down the hall, baby steps into the elevator, and so on. Seriously, if you haven’t watched the movie, rent it and have a good laugh! It’s a hilarious scene, but it’s actually brilliant. How do we grow from emotional infants to adults? Baby steps! Perhaps it starts with intentionally responding differently to a situation where you would typically avoid confrontation. Like, maybe a really small situation. Start there. Take one small courageous step to grow and you’ll grow.
Case and point, I had a super awkward situation happen at the lumber yard this past month. It shouldn’t have been awkward, it shouldn’t have been weird, but through a series of events, it turned real awkward real fast.
There was a misunderstanding with an employee (who is a lovely older gentleman that’s become my lumber yard friend and helps me pick out straight boards:).. I was looking to buy something and he said he personally owns what I was looking for and said I could have it. I was so excited! When I went to pick it up the next day he was nowhere to be found. Turns out he had forgotten that he had already given it to his brother a long time ago and he was hiding from me because he felt bad (a co-worker told me). Obviously, it was no big deal for me; I had already planned on buying the item. But my lumber yard buddy was embarrassed and avoided me.
My natural instinct was to think, “welp, I guess I can never go back to that lumber yard again to avoid unnecessarily awkward situations.” … But I felt sad that I’d be giving that up for a silly situation like this. So. Instead, I got in my car, drove to the lumber yard, chased down my lumber yard buddy (he was literally fleeing for the staff room!), and said,
“Hey. Your co-worker told me what happened. I want you to know that it’s totally no problem at all that you don’t have the table. I’ve got my plans, I’ve ordered all I need and it’s all good!”
We had a laugh and moved on and now I can continue to see my lumber yard buddy and life can carry on without a weird strain.
Why do I take the time to share this very small event that happened in my life? Because baby steps! It may not have been me facing one of the bigger things, but it was me intentionally making a choice to take a baby step in the right direction. Stack those small steps up and pretty soon we can take larger leaps and bounds into our emotional adulthood.
Baby steps, you got this!